Cloudy and a bit hazy. We woke up to find we had no water. It went off sometime between midnight when Mom got up to fill up her water cup and 4am when I tried to fill the coffee pot and found no flow. I finally found a small local news site which reported on a water main break that affected the Eastern part of the city. About 5am the water began flowing again but a boil order is in effect. I used to keep a supply of water on the shelf "just in case." I think I begin keeping a smaller supply again from now on. This is the first such problem since we came her 25 years ago.
I saw yesterday that Joann Fabrics is shutting down entirely. I remember that the company had been in bankruptcy for a while now. Too bad. In my area the choices for fabric lovers is Hobby Lobby (I refuse to support their Christian fundamentalist platform with my dollars) and Michaels which has recently started carrying cloth on the bolt again (perhaps with the Joann closures in mind. Right now I am still working my way through my stash so won't need any new fabric for a while. But I did like having a local alternative.
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Looks like a sunny day today. Temps are supposed to be in the high 50s. I think I will get a couple of things cleaned out on the patio. We are still in a boil advisory. I looked and didn't see any update on the situation saying otherwise.
Stray thought: some years (decades?) ago I read a sci-fi novel in which a very rich man secretly funded the development a fast spreading disease and the vaccine to neutralize it planning to spread the disease but protect particular groups of people. He believed that the human had to be reduced to a level the earth could sustain. I don't think the MAGA/DOGE idiots in D.C. have any such coherent thought but many of their cuts seem designed to accomplish the same goal Their actions couldn't better constructed to cull the human herd. We are watching the largest outbreak of measles for decades here in which one child has died, two dozen are hospitalized, more than 120 people have tested positive for the virus, and which has now spread to ten states (and counting). But the Federal agencies which would normally have responded haven't and the committee of experts that should have met to consider the date from the southern hemisphere and decide what flu strains should be included in next seasons flu vaccines didn't meet because the meeting had been canceled. Because USAID has been dismantled we aren't sending resources to identify and develop treatments for the new, recently discovered hemorrhagic fever that is exploding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But that aid was axed along with that for ebola treatment and AIDS treatments, and the Musk was totally clueless. He promised to reverse the freeze but according to the news hasn't yet.
Another stray thought: another bit of fiction I re-read recently involved how a technological civilization might lose that civilization over three generations. The last vignette focused on an old man who, in his youth, trained as an engineer while there was some hope that the high tech society could continue. He and a few friends cobbled together a small generator that actually produced enough electricity to keep a small refrigerator running. However, other aspects of our technology were beyond them. Electric lights? They didn't have the industrial infrastructure to create a vacuum or to produce a tungsten filament or some of the other parts needed to build light bulbs. And keeping the one bit of technology, the fridge, was impossible because parts broke that, without the supporting industrial infrastructure, couldn't be replaced. Trump's lawyers, fighting a lower court and appeals court order to unfreeze the funds USAID distributed to combat disease and hunger in various parts of the world, appealed to the Supreme Court raising the argument they hadn't raised in the lower courts that they couldn't comply because it would take months to restart the funds flowing. USAID provided the "infrastructure" for the funds to flow through a web of contractors and other organizations. The freeze blew up that up. The USAID "infrastructure" shriveled and couldn't be rebuilt as quickly as the DOGE bros were able to destroy it.
Heather Cox Richardson posted a long article on the actions of the DOGE wrecking crew and their effects on us here at home. It isn't pretty.
Wildfire Labs substack published a very long article on the potential economic effects of GLP-1 drugs--Ozempic and others in that class. Our consumer economy is based on impulse. Our stores and malls are laid out to trigger impulse buying. But GLP-1 drugs depress impulses. And it isn't just impulses around food but in other areas as well.
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